In the field of optical communication there is a strong demand for optical shaping, reshaping, and chopping of optical signals to perform transmission of optical information at a very high quality and very low Bit Error Rate (BER).
The implementation of ultra fast optical communication network faces, among other challenges, two major obstacles. The first is the need to produce very fast modulators and the second is to maintain high quality optical signals along significant distances to keep very low BER.
To produce the signals, at a very fast rate, there is a need for very fast modulators that are capable of producing very narrow optical pulses. Fast modulators are very expensive and there are only few types of modulators capable of producing narrow optical pulses suitable for use in extremely fast rate.
At high transmission rate, the pulse quality of the optical pulses degrades very fast in a relatively short distance due to pulse broadening caused by chromatic and polarization-mode dispersions. Accordingly, many Optical-Electrical-Optical (O-E-O) regenerators should be distributed along the propagation path. O-E-O regenerators are very expensive and complicated and thus dramatically increase the network cost in terms of infrastructure initial cost and maintenance cost. In addition the O-E-O regenerators reduce the network reliability.